Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 Review by LAPTOP Magazine

Dell's laptops have traditionally been known for their price rather than their performance, until last year, when Dell released the Inspiron XPS, a monster gaming system that blew us away with its souped-up performance and gaudy benchmark numbers. With newer, faster systems from Alienware and Voodoo having upped the ante, Dell has responded by releasing the Inspiron XPS Gen 2, a sleeker and more powerful version of the original that reclaims the XPS' title as the biggest game in town.

The first thing you'll notice about the XPS Gen 2 is the set of neon lights. Six Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) located in the front, back, and top of the notebook glow in different colors that can be altered inside Windows for color and intensity. Do they do anything special? No. Do they look cool? You bet. It's a hood ornament more than anything else, but one that shows Dell is beginning to understand that gaming laptops should not only be able to display bleeding-edge graphics at extreme levels, but look great while doing it.

The XPS Gen 2 has style. Its form factor has been slimmed from the boxy shape of the original for a sexier, thinner appearance. Besides the LEDs, the chassis has been redesigned for a glossier finish, with black accents that give the XPS Gen 2 a futuristic flair. The flashy look complements a notebook that's crammed with high-performance parts and state-of-the-art graphics.

As with most gaming laptops and desktop-replacement units, the Inspiron XPS Gen 2 boasts amazing performance. Its 3DMark2001 score of 23522 shatters our previous record of 19351, held by Alienware's Area-51m 7700, by a healthy 18 percent. There are two reasons for the new speed records: the Pentium 4 of the old XPS has been swapped out in favor of the more efficient Pentium M, and visuals are driven by Nvidia's most powerful graphics solution, the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Go Ultra. The Ultra differs from the regular 6800 Go by ramping up the clock speed of both the graphics processing unit (GPU) and its onboard memory to finally deliver the kind of performance Nvidia has been promising in the notebook world for some time.

Systems like the XPS Gen 2 are known as desktop replacements not only because of their stellar performance, but because they tend to weigh about as much as your desk. At 9.5 pounds and 15.5 inches across, the XPS Gen 2 is huge. As big as it is, it's actually two or three pounds lighter than other comparable gaming notebooks.

The battery life stinks out loud: It's about 90 minutes, half that while playing a DVD. But, asking about the weight, size, and battery life of a gaming notebook is like asking how many miles per gallon your Ferrari or Harley Davidson gets. Who cares? It's all about the speed and the looks.

Graphics look spectacular on the 17-inch WUXGA display. We ran frame-rate tests on Doom 3, Halo, and Half-Life 2, and the laptop outperformed all previous notebooks we've tested. Gamers looking for a portable system to haul to LAN parties won't (for now) find a notebook with more horsepower than the XPS Gen 2. DVD playback rendered smoothly, with little or no choppiness, stuttering, or picture artifacts, although the burner only does +R formats, which may be incompatible with some older DVD drives and players.

Our configuration came with Windows XP Media Center Edition, a do-it-all media program for dummies from Microsoft. Casual users looking to simplify things will likely embrace it. An external TV tuner costs $149.

There are more connectors than you will probably know what to do with, including six USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, Ethernet, DVI, S-video, IrDA, and an SD card reader.

The biggest improvement of the XPS Gen 2 over the XPS is the price. At just over $3,000, the second incarnation of the XPS is nearly $1,000 cheaper than the original model. Gaming notebooks loaded with powerful components have an ugly habit of turning into big-ticket items; keeping the price of a muscle laptop like the XPS Gen 2 out of the stratosphere may be the best feature of all. While the performance will inevitably be outclassed by laptops with dual-core processors, those are still six months to a year off, and for now this is the big kid on the block.

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Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2

A gaming machine so fast, you'll want a seatbelt.

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